


Airy Cages

by R00bs_Teacup



Series: airy cages [1]
Category: Endeavour (TV)
Genre: Oxford, Romance, location porn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-24
Updated: 2016-02-24
Packaged: 2018-05-23 02:01:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6101152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/R00bs_Teacup/pseuds/R00bs_Teacup
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>More Oxford meanderings. Morse's relationship with the city, and with the Thursdays</p>
            </blockquote>





	Airy Cages

**Author's Note:**

  * For [glim](https://archiveofourown.org/users/glim/gifts).



> For Glim, who dragged me kicking and screaming into the Endeavour fandom.

It's beautiful. There's only one word for it, really. Beyond the politics, and the painful university, and the professors and students and residence and all the battles that are held daily and have been held over generations, and can be seen stretching into the future, there's beauty. When it comes down to it, when it really comes down to staying or going, and it does so often come down to that for Morse because staying is a painful option. But when it really comes down to, staying is actually the only option. Because More doesn't know what he'd do without these bricks, this river, this stone. Without his cobbles and quads. 

What would he do without that breath before the sun sets on the Broad, where the buildings light up and there's nothing separating the now from the then and the to be? What would he do without the places to stand- Folly Bridge, looking right into the raging river; the well, Lewis Carol's treacle well; Binsey, the poplars and the gate and the dust-track, summer hazing the trodden billows golden; the cathedral, a unique blend of religion, academia, town and gown, all blended; Iffley lock, on to Sandford lock, countryside and habitation all jumbled. What would he do without Oxford? There's nothing like it, there never has been, not for him. 

“You'd manage,” Fred says, sitting in his easy chair, foot up. 

They're drinking whiskey, Win tutting at them but then joining them. They're talking over old cases and retirement- Fred's already out, and Morse keeps making noises. 

“What'd I think about, though?” Morse says. “When my mind spins. Here, I'm in a long line of people who do nothing but think. There's no one who's going to stop and ask me what I'm doing. There are always people reading, and talking about reading. Thinking is currency here.”

Fred doesn't say anything. He never does say much, when Morse talks about thinking and the city. For Fred, Oxford is just a place. Morse has never been able to explain it without resorting to poetry, which makes Fred's face go all crinkly and irritable. It's not that Fred doesn't like poetry, it's just that he'd prefer not to be quoted at by a slightly frantic Morse who's over excited by the thrum of the city, a thrum that Fred doesn't even feel. 

“The singing, then,” Morse says, next time he's at the Thursday's. Joan is home and she and Win are sat gossiping in the kitchen. Fred's in the garden, pretending to dig the vegetable patch but in fact just sitting smoking, Morse at his side. “Sitting on the step at the back of the Sheldonian, listening to something that you heard from across the street.”

“Other cities have singing in them,” Fred says. 

“But not like Oxford. Everywhere you go, you can hear something. A kid plonking away at a piano through an open window, the choirs in the evening. Every day there's something to hear, and every day it's something that's actually good,” Morse says. 

Fred just shrugs. Morse knows that he's just being stubborn now, because Fred loves the singing, too. He comes to listen when Morse performs, sometimes he sneaks into rehearsals too and sits in the pews, waiting for Morse, head back and eyes closed. I can pick out your voice Fred says. He can pick out Morse's voice, but never the voice of the city. 

Morse cycles. He's got the car at work and he likes the car, he likes cars in general, and likes to drive. But he cycles, sometimes, to feel the city spinning beneath his wheels, to hear the clatter on the cobbles, to feel the hills up to Headington. He likes to ride out to Whitam and walk for miles, just the forest and him, the silence, no one around. The wide pathways and the narrow, the trees surrounding him. There have been crime scenes here, but not enough to make him avoid it. Or he'll go up to Shotover and stand and look over the city. No, not the city. His city. Oxford belongs to him. 

“Nowhere would be like this,” Morse says. “I could never really leave it. I did try, but I never could. It draws you back. You get stuck in its gears, and then there's no escape.”

“Get on a bus. That'll do you,” Fred says. 

They're sitting in the Bird and Baby, indulging Morse's 'Tolkein Joy', as Win calls it. His 'bloody obsession' as Fred calls it. Morse isn't exactly a Tolkein fan, he's never really got that far and it's fantasy which he only really likes in theory. It's just that Tolkein sort of got stuck in the city cogs, too. Got enmeshed, and fell in love, and never escaped. Tolkein inhabited Oxford in a way few seem able to do. People come and go, most are transient, or seem to be, or stick to small areas, or avoid bits. Tolkein just inhabited it. Mostly the pubs. Morse feels like that is something he can get behind. 

Oxford and Oxford pubs are sometimes synonymous. Oxford is always a pint away from being a pub crawl. There's always a teetering moment of possibility, of Shrodinger. A moment where they haven't yet come to a decision on where they're going to drink, or if they're going to drink, and so time opens up and they're in all the pubs at once. There's a moment of sheer possibility. There's nothing like it elsewhere, because nowhere else is quite as ambitious as Oxford in terms of pub per square metre. Oxford is, as ever, an over achiever. There's always the choice of cosy, familiar, spacious, busy, quiet, town or gown, river, garden. And that's just on St Aldates. 

Morse is almost certain that Oxford and Oxford pubs are not synonymous to everyone, not even sometimes. Lewis seems happy to sit in a pub, though. Lewis is like Fred- he's not got the city in his bones. He's not got the kind of mind that has nowhere to go but in tight, quick spirals, over and over old ground, discovering new simply by turning over so much at once. Lewis is slow, to Morse. At least to begin with. 

“He's solid,” Fred says, approvingly, after meeting Lewis. 

“He seems very nice,” Win says. “He's got a wife, hasn't he?” 

“Yes,” Morse says. “Does one have to have a wife to seem nice?”

Win hits him with a teatowell, laughing. Her laugh is infectious and he joins her, and Fred looks at them both as if they're mad. As if he loves them both, for all that. 

“What'd I want to transfer anywhere else for, sir?” Lewis asks, when he's offered a promotion in some tiny backwater. “What'd I do without these streets?”

Morse pauses, wondering. 

“Sitting at the back of the Sheldonian,” he offers. “The last light on the Broad. The water.”

“That's it,” Lewis says. “It's a nice city.”

Morse goes to Fred, and sits in silence all evening. Win feeds him, and Fred gives him whiskey, and they tuck him into the spare bedroom, once Sam's room. Sam's home, for once, but he sleeps in Joany's old room instead. Morse has breakfast with Sam, and Sam does the Sam thing of being quiet but smiling loudly. He's always pleased when he finds Morse home. 

Home. 

“It's not just the city,” Morse says. 

They're out on Port Meadow, walking three a-breast. The wind is cutting, but they're shoulder to shoulder and they know how to dress for a Port Meadow walk. This is one in a thousand, a well trod path that their bodies know. The slow cows over the grass, the great flocks of geese, the ducks. The strange Crested Greebe who shouldn't really show up here but does, the wonky heron with such a clumsy take off, the little Moorhen and white-headed Coot. All are ingrained, known, charted and listed. Even the rare flash of Kingfisher isn't so rare. 

“No,” Fred says. “It's not.”

“I got enmeshed in the city, I can't escape, I'm not sure I want to. Breathing in Oxford is different. The place gets into you. I fell in love, I suppose. With all the streets and all the meadow the colleges and just all of it,” Morse says. 

And then, linking his arms with them, unable to say it any other way:

“And you two, of course.”


End file.
